president obama had a specific proposal to raise the rates to the clinton-era rates on the top 2%. there was a majority of republicans on exit polls who agreed with that. second, on the $1.1 trillion in entitlement cuts, that's really a bad idea. because what he's doing that is approaching by slashing benefits rather than reforming the system. i'll give you an example. we have to save money in health care not just in medicare but health care but we pay more, more than most countries, and we get less. here's an example of a reform. right now in medicare, when we buy prescription drugs, we buy wholesale but we pay retail and the law requires us to pay retail. whereas in the v.a., in medicaid, we do price discounts when we're purchasing. if we did that in medicare that would save us $160 billion a year. so what i'd like to see is us save money on health care. we need to do that. but it's got to be through system reform. host: can you save enough money through system reform without looking at benefits? guest: you know, you got to start there, because you really don't want to be saying